Oracle 10gR2 Java installer fails on Ubuntu AMD64

Apparently Oracle 10g does work on Gentoo AMD64, some of the info
there might be useful:

  http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_Oracle_10g

I also tried copying all the insalled Oracle files from a CentOS 4.2
x86-64 machine, then relinking the binaries via Oracle's
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/relink script.

Additional details are in the files here:

  http://www.piskorski.com/ora/10g-ubuntu-transcript.txt
  http://www.piskorski.com/ora/relink-1.txt
  http://www.piskorski.com/ora/relink-2.txt

Briefly, the relink clearly wasn't finding libpthread and libc at all
(!), but that was because it was looking for libpthread.so and libc.so
rather than libpthread.so.0 and libc.so.6.  Adding a few symlinks
cleared up that problem.  (Incidentally, shouldn't Ubuntu have had
those symlinks in the first place?)

After that, some of the relinks failed.  The only hard errors seem to
be these:

  /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.0.2/../../../crt1.o: In function `_start':
  ../sysdeps/x86_64/elf/start.S:106: undefined reference to `__libc_csu_fini'
  ../sysdeps/x86_64/elf/start.S:107: undefined reference to `__libc_csu_init'
  collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
  make: *** [ctxhx] Error 1

Any ideas what the problem might be there?  There are also other
oddities in the relink output, e.g.:

  /bin/rm: cannot remove `/db/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib/': Is a directory
  /usr/bin/ld: cannot open output file /db/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib/: Is a directory

  /usr/bin/find: /db/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib32/.1.0: Too many levels of symbolic links
  /usr/bin/find: /db/oracle/product/10.2.0/lib/.1.0: Too many levels of symbolic links

For comparison, I also did a relink on CentOS, which shows none of he
above strangeness.  This suggests that, unfortunately, Oracle's
problems on Ubuntu AMD64 may not be SOLELY Java related.

On the other hand, the Oracle's Java Installer appear to actually
compile some Oracle libraries, as you can see from its (ugly) log file
here:

  "$ORACLE_HOME/install/make.log"

The relink certainly does not regenerate those *.o files.  I'd think
that object files generated on CentOS would still work fine on Ubuntu,
but I don't really know for sure.  Anyway, that's all something of a
diversion.  I know people who have regularly installed Oracle 8i by
simply copying files from one system to another, but they only did
that on essentially identical boxes.

I don't know all of what Oracle's Java installer is REALLY doing
underneath, and from the above, it seems even more clear that getting
it to run is a necessary prerequisite to getting the Oracle RDBMS
working on Ubuntu AMD64 at all.

And of course, Oracle ships other utilities implemented in Java, like
dbca, which you really do want working even if you somehow magically
got Oracle corectly installed via some non-Java method.

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/